What is developer evangelism and why is it important?

Matt Thompson / November, 2017

Description

Matt Thompson, General Manager at Microsoft Commercial Software Engineering shares why it is important to build developer evangelism. Something he have built at Microsoft for more than eight years now.

Video transcript:

What is developer evangelism and why is it important?

The interesting thing about developer evangelism is that it really encompasses the entire spectrum of how we engage with developers. From getting them interested in our platform, to get them to use our platform, to get them deep into our platform, and eventually turning them into champions of our platform. There are a lot of words in the industry. You’ll hear community advocate, community evangelist, developer evangelist, even developer advocate.

We like the word evangelism because it says a couple of different things. It doesn’t only say that we’re engaged with devs and helping them because that is a key piece, but we’re super passionate about what we do. I think still I have the best day job in Silicon Valley. I wake up every morning super excited to talk to these communities and talk about technologies.

For us, if we don’t have that passion why would they have this passion for the technology and the platform as well. For us, developer evangelism describes very well what we do, but it is about that early engagement where we build awareness. Sometimes we call our team the geeks that speak, as a way to give people a thought on how we do this.

We go all the way from speaking at large conferences, all the way to hacking side by side with devs and kind of teaching them on how the platform works.